Henry's Web Log

The British forces here are huge fans of soccer, as is the rest of the world except good old USA. Of course, our big sport is football. It’s interesting that “football” means soccer everywhere else in the world but the United States. I recently asked myself what analogies soccer vs. football would have to US vs. UK military operations.

For starters, soccer is a continuous moving game, with both sides constantly engaged in both offense and defense. Player substitutions are barely noticed, happening throughout the game.

US Football, on the other hand, involves careful, deliberate planning. There is tremendous violence of action, and then both sides go back to a huddle and plan the next action. After four tries to score or advance the ball, offense switches with defense, and brings out a different set of players.

Applied to the military operations in Basra, the UK has rotated soldiers through Iraq in 4 to 6 month individual deployments, much more often (continuous flow) than the US moving entire brigades at a time.

Now I am going to break away from the US versus UK comparison to continue the soccer versus football analogy. What about keeping score? A good soccer match score is something like 2 to 3. A good football game is 23 to 48. Purely by the numbers, football accomplishes much more in its violent, carefully planned operations.

Soccer only has one way to score: get the ball in the goal. Football has touchdowns, field goals, extra points, 2 point conversions and safeties. In war, the old-school way to win was to destroy troops or targets. But the new full spectrum of combined operations ranges from full scale land, sea and space warfare to stability and peacekeeping operations, where the way to win is through the hearts and minds of the people. The weapons include information, money, infrastructure improvements and stable governance. In stability operations, there really aren’t any losers as the military exits and the country enjoys unprecedented peace and economic prosperity. In football, even the loosing playoff team walks away with several million dollars!